Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — October 2023
Category Archives: Previews
The new conservative dilemma a symposium
Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – October 2023
Against the Current
Where’s the support for Democratic insurgents?
For decades, New Hampshire has generated brisk and gratifying drama with its first-in-the-nation presidential primary. The Granite State momentously destroyed a presidency in 1968, when the Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy ran against President Lyndon Johnson on an antiwar platform.
The Spy
On seeing without being seen
by Rachel Cusk
Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.
Views: The New York Times Magazine – Sept 17, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (September 17, 2023): The 9.17.23 Issue features Emily Bazelon on abortion rights being won through state ballots after the Dobbs decision; Audra D.S. Burch on the death of Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado and the city’s deep divide over policing; Teju Cole on Greek tragedies; Dan Brooks on the Italian rock band Måneskin; and more.
The Surprising Places Where Abortion Rights Are on the Ballot, and Winning
After Dobbs, the political ground seems to be shifting in some unpredictable ways.
By EMILY BAZELON
The Trials of Aurora: A Colorado City’s Deep Divide Over Policing
After Elijah McClain died in 2019, the case seemed to be closed. The George Floyd protests — and the backlash to them — would change everything.
One by one, the five men — three police officers and two paramedics — walked up before the judge one afternoon this January. Their lawyers stood beside them, and the wooden benches of the Colorado courtroom were filled with family, friends and fellow police officers and paramedics.
Finance Preview: Barron’s Magazine – Sept 18, 2023
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – SEPTEMBER 18, 2023:
Why the UAW Strike Isn’t the Biggest Issue for Ford and GM
The labor action highlights the biggest issue: Can the auto makers afford to spend what it takes to thrive in the new world of EVs?
This Highflying Defense Stock Stumbled. That’s a Reason to Buy.
The defense contractor spent heavily on acquisitions, then struggled during the pandemic. Now with new senior leadership working to fix its operational problems, its shares could fly.
Arm Is a Pricey Bet on AI
Arm Holdings closed its first day as a public company priced at more than 25 times sales and 100 times profit. It’s a pricey bet on AI.4 min
From Mom-and-Pop Shops to Powerhouses: Here Are Barron’s Top Independent Financial Advisors
With a full range of investment and planning services at their fingertips, independent financial advisors are managing more of America’s wealth. Here’s how they do it.
Unions Are Rising Up Again. The Fallout for Labor and the Economy.
The United Auto Workers strike is unlikely hurt the economy much. But it could encourage other unions to bargain more aggressively.
The New York Times Book Review – Sept 17, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 17, 2023): The new issue features An Illustrated Guide to Toppling the Patriarchy, New Thrillers, Appalachian Literature, The Good Virus, and more…
An Illustrated Guide to Toppling the Patriarchy
In its first half-century, Ms. magazine upended norms, disrupted the print world and made trouble. It was a start.
By Anna Holmes
50 YEARS OF MS.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution, edited by Katherine Spillar and the editors of Ms.
I had my first conscious interaction with Ms. magazine as a small child when I read — or rather, had read to me — a story-poem called “Black Is Brown Is Tan.”
Part of the magazine’s delightful kids’ section, “Black Is Brown Is Tan” is about a mixed-race family not unlike my own who go about their daily routines like any other Americans. Though I was young, I remember the illustrations, by Emily Arnold McCully, with acute clarity: the rosy cheeks of the white dad, the short Afro and hoop earrings of the Black mom, and, perhaps most important, the sense of safety and warmth that permeated every page. In our house, where my mother was careful about the messaging of the media and toys we consumed, the “Stories for Free Children” section was always welcome. As for the magazine they appeared in? Well, it was canon.
A Rich, Capacious Family Saga, Bookended by Tragedy
In Diana Evans’s new novel, “A House for Alice,” a woman who immigrated to Britain for marriage must decide whether or not to return to her country of origin after her husband dies.
By Tiphanie Yanique
A HOUSE FOR ALICE, by Diana Evans
Houses in Diana Evans’s new novel, “A House for Alice,” are a metaphor for family. They’re filled with rooms for sleeping, lovemaking, fighting; contain corridors that lead to areas of welcome and comfort; shelter spaces that hold secrets. And like a house, a family can be burned to nothing and rebuilt anew.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – Sept 16, 2023
How artificial intelligence can revolutionise science
Consider the historical precedents
Debate about artificial intelligence (ai) tends to focus on its potential dangers: algorithmic bias and discrimination, the mass destruction of jobs and even, some say, the extinction of humanity. As some observers fret about these dystopian scenarios, however, others are focusing on the potential rewards. ai could, they claim, help humanity solve some of its biggest and thorniest problems. And, they say, ai will do this in a very specific way: by radically accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, especially in areas such as medicine, climate science and green technology.
Modi’s “one India” goal is good for the economy, but not for politics
In the next decade regional tensions will build in India
The world has been seeing the bright side of India. In August it landed a spacecraft on the Moon. In the latest quarter gdp grew at an annual rate of 7.8%, making it the world’s perkiest big economy. Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has just hosted a g20 summit where other leaders, including Joe Biden, courted Asia’s rising behemoth. Yet inside India the talk has turned to whether Mr Modi’s hunger for power and dreams of national renewal could lead him to bend the constitution.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 15, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (September 15, 2023): The new issue features what connects the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, the Tichborne Trial and life on a sugar plantation in Jamaica? In a New Yorker essay Zadie Smith spelt out the preoccupations of The Fraud, her novel set in the Victorian era, as “fake identities, fake news, fake relationships, fake histories”. Ainsworth, in Smith’s view, was a fraud as a historical novelist.
A worldlier class of flapper
Ursula Parrott scandalized and titillated Hollywood in the 1930s
Democrat or revolutionary?
Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup
Research Preview: Science Magazine – Sept 15, 2023
Mars Sample Return risks consuming NASA science
Forthcoming cost estimate for budget-busting mission could lead to strict caps from Congress
Iran prepares to erect a digital wall
Researchers feel increasingly isolated as government moves to restrict internet access
Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Autumn 2023
The New York Review Of Books – October 5, 2023
Mother Russia
In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.
Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Some months ago I was having dinner with a writer from Moscow. I told him I was thinking of reviewing a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped, a Bollywood-inspired novella that pays homage to the Soviets’ love of Indian cinema. “Don’t do it,” he—a friend of hers—warned me. “If she doesn’t like what you write, she will turn you into a character in one of her stories—the stupid girl in New York who doesn’t know anything.” Being a longtime admirer of Petrushevskaya, I wasn’t too worried: realism is not her thing.
Ukraine’s New Normal
Away from the front, life appears to be the same, but the country has undergone profound changes.
On August 8 I went to the Jellyfish Museum in Kyiv. During my previous visits to the city, it had been closed because of the war. Now it has reopened. In the gloom the fantastical creatures drifted about in their tanks while couples, friends, and families drifted about happily looking at them. In Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border, the Half an Hour café, where I wrote for a couple of days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, has also just reopened.
Boomers Daily 